Hokusai's wave and volcanic eruptions
27 Jan 2022
What another action-packed week it's been.
The class have been working really hard to use figurative language to create the strength of feeling needed in their writing to match the atmosphere given in pictures. As we've been studying Kensuke's Kingdom, we focused our attention on the sea. Looking at how volatile it can be, calm and appealing one moment, to almighty storms and colossal waves the next. We've tried hard to create poems which reflect a temperamental ocean.
To finish off our creative pieces, we, as the very-talented Mrs Lyall was with us, made some wave images inspired by Hokusai's wave. We've tried to capture the differing colours in waves, as well as the texture. We think, together with our poems, they create the atmosphere we were hoping for. Here's some finished pieces.
In other areas, we've been talking about volcanic explosions! (It's always jolly topics in class 4!) we've been learning about how volcanic eruptions are caused. We know that magma chambers form within the earth's crust having found a weak spot (usually between tectonic plates) and that overtime mounting pressure, or plate-tectonic movement can cause them to erupt, sometimes with little to no warning!
We made lava lamps to visualise how the mantle (the layer of Earth before the crust) appears, being a mixture of melted rock and semi-solid rock.
Not being satisfied by a mere lava lamp, we watched pressure mount in a shaken, unopened bottle and talked about how this could be cause for eruption in a volcanic situation. Having been teaching nearly 12 years here (
!!) I've finally found an educational reason to try the mentos and coke explosion... we watched the pressure/chemical changes and how they can force liquid to erupt.
And finally, we made sculptures of the cross-section of volcano to investigate its structure. We now know how magma escapes from the chamber and leaves as lava.
We then labelled the components of the volcano
Happy weekend